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Daily Archives: November 8, 2012

Iasta: Smart Source-Style! Part I.

It’s 2012 and your fiscal year is coming to an end.
It’s time to get a handle on organizational spend.
Because if you don’t, you will find that the Mayans were dead on.
And in 2013, your organization will be gone.

So what’s changed since we last covered Iasta in depth in 2008/2009? Especially since the solution footprint looks the same from a cursory review of their web site? If you’re taking a thirty-thousand foot view, not much. But if you take the time to get down in the weeds, everything!

The biggest changes are:

Native Analytics Capability

Improved (Native) Contract Management Capability

Better, Integrated, SIM and SPM Capabilities

Extensive Support for Third Party Data Feeds

P2P Integration Capabilities

Customizable Reporting and Dashboards for Users and Executives

A Broader Services Offering

Native Analytics Capability
A few years ago, Iasta was dependent on third parties like BIQ, now part of Opera Solutions and Spend Radar, now part of SciQuest for their spend analytics capability. And while they still make use of third parties for initial cleansing and classification in new initiatives, they now have the same slice-and-dice reporting capability that you’ll find in any other sourcing suite on the market. (And while it doesn’t have the data analytics power of best-in-class solutions like BIQ, it is the 80% solution for most sourcing departments, especially in the mid-market, which typically have very little insight into spend.)

Improved (Native) Contract Management Capability
A few years ago, Iasta‘s contract management capability was limited to the definition of a few meta-data elements. Now, it’s a fully featured contract management offering that allows for storage and indexing of all your contracts, authoring of new contracts, and automated reporting for SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) to keep you out of stripes like Fox.

Better, Integrated, SIM and SPM Capabilities
You wouldn’t know it from their web-site, but Iasta has developed some fairly extensive built-in SIM/SPM capabilities that your organization can use to track compliance, performance, sustainability, and risk data elements that can have an impact on your sourcing events. In addition, this is integrated with the supplier data that has always been collected in the RFX module and the contract data in the contract module and all of this data can be sliced and diced by Iasta‘s built-in analytics and reporting modules.